graz

I'm just migrating to VW from Cinema4D so please bear with me. In Cinema, my default view upon launching the application was a isometric view with perspective. Our line of work usually doesn't require much preliminary 2D drafting and dropping 3D primatives into the workspace is normally how we start things off. My first question is: How do I make this my default, start-up view? Currently, the top view with no perspective is the default. My second question is: When I switch the view to RIGHT ISO and the projection to PERSPECTIVE I now see a black framed window with "picture frame" corners. However, this picture frame is never large enough to see my entire model and when I enlarge it via. dragging it's corners it seems to make the view's perspective very extreme and harsh. Can I remove this picture frame altogether? Or at least have it much larger by default so as not to have to expand it each time? I'm obviously having trouble with basic navigation in the 3D space. Any help? Thanks.

This is a big issue for me as well working in the Trade show exhibit design field. We've been trying to incorporate VW into our workflow since version 8 but just can't warm up to the crude 3D capabilities. We're currently working in Cinema4D and would like to do the majority of our modeling in a true CAD application (for the benefit of our fabrication and CNC department) but feel like it's just too much of a step backwards in regard to creating and modifying objects in 3D. Very little of our work process is done in a 2D environment. I'm hoping that, even if version 2009 doesn't address the current shortcomings, that 2010 will as the programing team learns to exploit the capabilities of the Parasolids kernel.

Mike's solution is available to anyone as well. As long as you have quicktime installed.

We've used C4D since 2003 and have nothing but praise for the application. For your purposes, it should work very well. As far as animation goes, character animation has been a bit of a weak spot for Cinema but Arch viz and assembly will be fine. Great interface and the base price is pretty affordable. The base package will not provide Global illumination style renderings however. You'd need the add-on module.

Not to send this discussion in a different direction, but Andy is correct in that Maxon, while they offer their own, very strong, integrated rendering engine, they are very helpful to any 3rd party solution developers. They do this with all facets of their application. They seem to understand that their users like to have options, even if we don't all take advantage of them. As a dedicated user, t's nice to see that Maxon ownership has not chosen to create an island of their product.

That's disappointing to hear. Our Engineering dept. holds only one seat of VW and 8 seats of AutoCAD. Our Design dept. uses C4D (7 seats) I was hoping to transition everyone, Engineers AND Designers, to VW for all modeling tasks. I was justifying the "transition pain" with the payoff of seamless transfer we'd have from VW into C4d for our rendering needs. With that transfer not being quite so seamless, and indications that it may not improve in the future, it really shelves that plan.

While the VW combo does offer dynamic updating, much like the exchange process, it's quite rigid and, at least for us, requires a tremendous amount of alteration in our file structure to make it work correctly. It just feels too inflexible to really be a useful tool for us. I can't understand why there isn't a simple "one to one" transfer of items with all names intact within the complete heirarchy. Right now, only the container folders (based on color or class) retain their names. The items within are renamed generic polygon objects.

It's true, VW's 3D component is not very intuitive. Coming from Cinema 4D, I find it to be quite primative and somewhat dis-jointed. I too hope that this gets a major re-work in the next major version.

I may be wrong, but I didn't think it was possible to convert an imported mesh (or any mesh) into a parametric primative. Once it's a mesh, it's only a mesh.

This is one area where VW and Cinema need to collectively "get on the ball." This plug-in has existed for some time now but is quite hobbled in that there are severe limitations on what gets transferred and how it gets transferred. Now with version 10.5 C4D offers DWG import. All object names and file structure remain intact. It seems the AutoCAD + Cinema combo has really "leapfrogged" the VW combo. Strange that seamless transfer hasn't been developed between these two.

The current plugin is pretty weak in it's implementation. It groups by color or class and then creates "containers" in Cinema that hold the collection of unnamed polygon objects. Seems like the integration between the two should be more seamless considering the family relationship. We're looking to replace a dozen seats of AutoCAD with VW but this issue doesn't make it quite so easy.